Managing Organizational Change
Cincom and Accountability of Sales Representative for Results
Cincom is a 43-year-old developer of enterprise software applications and by virtue of the designed-in nature of their applications, has been able to literally coast on a comfortable wave of recurring revenue for a decade. This recurring revenue stream is comprised of license payments, maintenance fees, and the continual need for updates to mission-critical systems the company sold, in some cases, decades ago. With the majority of revenue being generated through a recurring revenue stream, the urgency and intensity to sell which is often found in smaller, younger, and more cash-starved businesses is not as prevalent inside Cincom. The framework for change model provides an invaluable construct in which to analyze the complacency of Cincom, what contributed to that false sense of security, and the path back to being a competitor in their core markets (Kotter, 2008).
Analysis of Sales Representative Roles and Accountability
It was common before the change in sales accountability, organizational structure and quota re-alignment to have Cincom sales representatives who had not sold anything in two years or more. Having created an organizational culture that was more attuned to maintaining accounts and ensuring customers were satisfied enough to renew their maintenance and software licensing contracts, Cincom sought out sales people who were excellent at maintaining accounts. These sales teams were not however adept at prospecting, working on new opportunities and closing new business. As a result, the culture began to became more focused on relationships as tantamount in selling and less on results. The factors that also contributed to this culture was the rapid build-out of enterprise software globally, the increasingly balkanized...
These are the two most powerful factors that anchor the Force Field Model analysis of the enterprise software industry. With the driving and restraining forces in continual interaction and at times conflict, productivity shifts drastically across the continuums of industries based on the impact of driving and restraining forces (Paquin, Koplyay, 2007). Cincom is being affected by the disruptive driving forces of CAPEX and OPEX most severely as competitors are
Change Management Plan for Cincom Systems Cincom Systems is one of the leading enterprise software companies in the U.S. serving aerospace and defense, industrial, and high tech electronics manufacturers. The company's founder and CEO continues to operate the five divisions of the company privately, with only a handful of insiders knowing the real financial condition of the company. During the recessions of the 1990s, the company management decided to forego annual
Taking the single most critically important process that Marketing is involved within lead generation, is a case in point. Today Cincom Marketing has project managers who often manage up to fifty to sixty projects across two or more product divisions, yet have only three writers on staff and a group of part-time graphic artists. This equates into a wait time for new projects in excess of six months or
The exponential growth of the Internet has also served as the catalyst for the growth of highly collaborative, interactive forums and platforms on which Delphi-like brainstorming can be accomplished (Decker, Wagner, Scholz, 2005). Conversely many of the external relationships companies have and that are essential to understanding how the strategic planning process will impact an organization lend themselves to quantification. An example of this level of quantification of external
In siding with the marketing and sales teams, my position was that accuracy and speed of the development was more critical to meeting and exceeding customer expectations. The transformational power of leadership is kin changing a culture and making it more agile, market-driven and aggressively focused on customer needs. The argument of speed and accuracy for the customer, and more importantly to hold onto them as a client, overshadowed
A change management strategy that concentrates on getting the feedback of the sales teams, who will be the primary uses of the CRM system, and also the engineering team who will want to evaluate it, are both critical. This focus on shared ownership will overcome the political factors and forces that will push for the SaaS-based CRM system to be not installed and used. The sales teams however will
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